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Challenging Art, and Society

Grayson Perry with part of his tapestry series "The Vanity of Small Differences" at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London.Credit
Andrew Testa/Panos

LONDON — A motorcycling 53-year-old transvestite potter who creates ceramics featuring kinky sex and his much-loved teddy bear is not an obvious choice as arbiter of British taste.

But Grayson Perry, winner of the Turner Prize a decade ago, has risen lately to become one of the most amusing and eloquent artists in England. Honors have poured in: a major exhibition at the British Museum in 2011; an award-winning television series about taste last year; a prestigious lecture series for the BBC in recent weeks. Prints of his work reportedly hang in high government offices. He even gave the queen a drawing of his (pink) motorcycle.

Mr. Perry may be part of the establishment today, but he didn’t always feel welcome there, especially in the unfashionable field of pottery. He retains a smidgen of that outsider identity, and uses it to decode art for the average citizen.

Born to humble beginnings in Essex, he entered art college in 1979, a period of strife in Britain and the year that Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.

Through the Blair years, Mr. Perry’s work often dwelled on transvestism and his painful childhood. But his work was often overshadowed by the Young British Artists, a group including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. While they pickled a shark (Mr. Hirst) and put an unmade bed in a gallery (Ms. Emin), Mr. Perry toiled at handmade pots.

In recent years, he has broadened his themes, venturing outside his own psychology into ambitious pieces about British society itself, employing wit and satire inspired by the 18th-century artist and social critic William Hogarth.

Despite all the demands on him, Mr. Perry still works without assistants. “They wouldn’t do it wrong in the right way,” he quipped, during a conversation at his studio in north London. “It’s just me here and that’s how I like it.”

In artist’s garb rather than drag — a T-shirt, sweatpants and dusty clogs, his blond hair in a messy page-boy — Mr. Perry spoke about the predominance of lousy work produced today, of his belief that contemporary art is neglecting the value of beauty, and of his experience as a very public transvestite. Here is an edited version of the conversation.

Q. What would you say is wrong with the contemporary art world?

A. The thing is, there isn’t a contemporary art world. It’s a hugely varied field that runs from very traditional, right through to the outer reaches of experimental, interactive, politicized art. I don’t like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who’s heavily involved in contemporary art, they’d say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don’t expect to like much of it.

Q. Is that why some viewers of contemporary art feel frustrated: because they go into these exhibitions or galleries expecting to appreciate the work?

A. They’re used to going into modern-art museums or historical museums where you’ve got the best of the best. If you go into a good museum, it has been filtered and filtered by the canon and by historians.

So when you go to a contemporary-art show — which has got 1 percent of the best of the best, and 5 percent of quite nice, and the rest is absolutely appalling — then that’s a difficult thing to get used to.

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A. It’s probably more now. In some ways, the threshold in the past was higher to get into the art world. You had to have a level of skill to be able to paint, or have the time or the money to set aside to make art, so therefore there were fewer artists and it was a middle-class occupation maybe. Whereas nowadays, the threshold is lower.

But I still think that if you asked the person who sits on the front desk at Sotheby’s when people bring in their works to be appraised, a high proportion of Impressionists are rubbish.

Q. If over time we come to recognize real value — that the dross gets thrown out and quality remains 200 or 300 years from now — that implies, don’t you think, that there’s something objective about quality in art?

A. No, there’s just the process of time. There’s a series of subjectivities. It’s like finer and finer mesh sieves.

Q. You’ve been fairly critical of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the press.

A. People always ask you about them. They’re like the Aunt Sallies. I can see why they’re successful. The comments I make about them are usually just a reflection of what I see. Damien, his work has right from the off been concerned with money.

Q. Do you think the dominance of the Young British Artists is over now?

A. Yeah.

Q. What comes next, what replaces them?

A. The idea that art is a progression, and it smoothly segues into the next movement, is very out of date now. There’s lots of things happening all over the world, little pools of creativity that bubble up. But particularly the press are desperate for there to be a story that involves a movement that they can declare. That’s the frustration with a more realistic vision of what art is like now. It’s not so dramatic as that, I’m afraid. It hasn’t got a nice, clean narrative.

Q. Still, it seems that you have been trying to shift the art world. You’ve said “sincerity is the new shocking.” And you speak about beauty again. Is that a direction you’re hoping to nudge the art world into?

A. What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It’s like expanding its territory. And it’s almost like the Roman Empire: it’s got all these troops lined up on the edges, fighting away, and has forgotten what’s going on in the middle. It’s forgotten that the U.S.P. [unique selling proposition], the thing that art set out with, is objects of beauty. I still think a lot of people go to art galleries to look at beautiful things. I don’t think that’s such a shocking thing to think.

Q. Your public image is that of “the transvestite potter.” Your transvestism is personal but it’s also probably been quite useful in publicizing yourself. Some critics have said that you use it as a publicity tool. How do you view it in terms of your work, your life?

A. It changes. It used to be a very private thing. For the first 15 years of my career, it was something that didn’t hardly crop up at all. I might have made work about it, but I didn’t dress up in as a public way as I do now. When the Turner Prize came along — by then, I was much more confident and I was dressing up in a more flamboyant way. I did realize it had publicity value. When they asked me, when nominated for the Turner Prize, to give them a publicity photo, I gave them a photograph of me with a beard, looking quite somber. Was that used by any newspaper? No. They all dug out a photograph of me in a frock.